


The Doll and the Dummy

by homo_pink



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prison, Aphasia, First Love, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Mental Instability, Muteness, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-22 22:08:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13176210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/pseuds/homo_pink
Summary: “The first thing they tell you when you take the job is never to fall in love with an inmate.”Jensen is a new correctional nurse at the prison that houses a young, mentally unstable Jared.





	The Doll and the Dummy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dollarformyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarformyname/gifts).



> i picked out a few of your likes and went for those: prison fic, mutism/voice loss, horror (very mildly), plotty fic, barefoot, competence, and hostage situations (sorta kinda)
> 
> and i'm so, so sorry this is a little late! ♡

The Charge Nurse is a dino of a man with a portly body and pudding for a belly. Wiry, white tufts as ear decor, skin-bald and eggish up top. With a cherry topper of an upcurled mustache, he looks like his name ought to be Melvin or Maurice. Most of the chicken coop just call him Doc.

Doc’s holed up in his cubby office when Jared’s brought down for his A.M. dosage, and the door’s a hair ajar.

There’s talk about inevitable malingering, all the cry-wolfs that’ll shuffle through the infirmary doors, and how valued a skill strong assessment is, and Doc asks whoever he’s speaking with to go on and name the five rights of medication administration, please. So, an interview.

Doc is impressed with the candidate adding on the oft-forgotten sixth and says so, chortling. Doc’s a chortler.

“—now let’s take this into hypothetical waters,” Doc says, scribbling on a tablet. From his yellow plastic chair, Jared can see slivers of movement. “There’s a third tier jumper, and you’re doing med rounds. You’re in their radius, right nearby. Tell me what you’ll do.” 

Everybody heard what happened to Sondra a week ago. Prison news travels like an AR-15, hitting immediate and many. She lived but resigned, citing undue and ongoing mental trauma.

Jared flexes his forearm, relaxes it all noodly, and watches as the morning nurse gets a clean stab on the first go. Today is also blood test day. Jared gives good vein but some of the staff still get a little clutched around him, needlessly. 

He isn’t going to hurt them. He hasn’t wanted to hurt anyone in years. 

A dab of cotton plus one artificially flesh-colored bandaid and it’s time to go.

Jared gets up, belly chain and and leg irons clinking, and gets to hear his favorite part: the anti-fraternization discourse that’s always tacked on last. _Professional distance. No inmate favors._

He’s listened to a partial few come-and-go interviews by now. Not everyone can cope with hearing the caged birds sing, day in, day out. But it’s funny to listen to some of them squirm and balk, confronted with the idea of making friends with the shit on their shoes. Or more.

A lot of sex is had behind these barbwired fences, within these sixty-foot hell walls.

While Jared waits for the correctional officer to escort him back to bug ward, he leans on a doorjamb and wiggles his wrists in their bracelets, and has a much better view into Doc’s office. He gets a good thirty second window and it’s. Enough.

Jared’s first seedling thought is — _oh, it’s a male nurse_ , when the guy looks up, meets his watchful unblinking eye, starts to smile a fraction to friendly at Jared in his white jumpsuit, abruptly thinks better of it, and cuts his eyes while Doc’s talking in his 1950’s sock hop-chaperone way about the carnality of forbidden relationships. 

Male nurse’s ears tip a charming, delicate shade of baby rose and Jared’s second thought, as he’s being cattle-walked back down the halogen lit corridor, after seeing his face and the heart shape of his mouth, is that he hopes this guy has the good sense to walk back out through the state of the art metal detectors and never come back again.

Nothing beautiful ever lasts long in here, if it lasts at all.

 

~

 

Someone down the block is making spud juice. 

It’s not quite time for count, about an hour yet, but some of the guys are already snoozin’, old timers, day drunks. The other inmates are playing rummy, sharpening their toothbrush shanks, making eyes and words and rot-tooth tongues at the latest batch of fish.

The odor is faint but for those who’ve got the good nose, it’s. A yeasty, acidic smell. Jared sniffs, chips another piece of paint off the cinderblock, color of dirty water, cold old gray. 

He’s been down in gen pop all afternoon, plugging his push broom through the common areas, work ID dangling at his pants pocket. Jared doesn’t live in this unit, but it’s an ok change of scenery in a movie where the scenes never change. A forever film. Jared will always be right here.

He’s stopped to sit on the floor in a quieter corner tuck for his ten minute break, where he usually counts to 600 in Spanish in his head—

“Eyy,” one of the guys at the round table says, the one with the silver fang. He throws a nine down onto the pile. “Speaking of tail.” 

The skinhead to his 10 o’clock is dirty playing, Jared can read his tells and twitches, but the rest of them probably know it, too, are just riding it out ‘til they can get magic hands to a blind spot and educate.

“Speaking of tail,” fang says, lids low, legs spread, “any a’you fools done see the new hospital honey?”

Only up to 114, Jared’s nubbed fingernail pauses in its flick and his palm clenches involuntarily.

He hasn’t seen — hasn’t seen any additions to the RX crew, and Jared visits at least once a day. More if it’s a troubled day. He tries not to have those as much. Sometimes he can’t help it. 

“Oh, she a bad one,” fang tells them all, smile glinting like saw-edged metal, smoothing a thick hand between his legs. “She a _bad_ one. Mmm, dollface got me wantin’a fuck my own shit up for a patch up.”

In the rec center, Jared sweeps up smoke butts and rodent droppings, and doesn’t feel any wandering pangs of disappointment, nor relief. Jared doesn’t feel anything at all. The chlorpromazine takes solid care of that, and it pumps all the way through to his once upon a time heart.

 

~

 

A Charlie Brown Valentine is playing in Jared’s dorm room that night, like it is every night. 

They don’t call them cells over in this wing. Warden thinks it can be too bald-faced, distressing — not everyone here remembers what they did. 

It’s true that Jared might have a door instead of bars and tumbler locks, but he’s also got a big shatter resistant plexiglass window and a bedwetter bunkmate. Ammonia has become a relative odor. Padded phrasing aside, they’re all bullpens.

There isn’t actually a television in their dorm, or much else aside from a steel shit bowl, two chairs and an off-center corkboard, but Jared’s latest roomie has his seat facing the south wall and Jared knows through weeks of studying him, that the TV is right there. 

And it’s getting to the good parts: Charlie Brown’s mounting obsession with the little red haired girl.

Roomie #4 is mumbling chippy lines, and Jared recognizes them easily enough. He watched this one a lot as a sickly boy in bed. So Jared grabs his own seat, flips it to the south wall, too, backwards straddles it, and stares at the cement with a going sideways smile.

_“I can’t just go up to that little red haired girl and talk to her. She has a pretty face. And pretty faces make me nervous.”_

 

~

 

Two weeks slug by before Jared understands. 

He remembers a midnight terror, worming out of bed, and then a pink-hot burst of pain. Repeated pains. He blinks dimly open to a countertop lined with acrylic canisters full of wooden tongue depressors, swabs. Stubbier jars of gauze and cotton rounds, and a large biohazard bin. 

He’s in the medical unit. He’s also got a noosed bone, tightly cuffed to the bed rail by one gangly arm, and the sound jingles pleasantly throughout the small room when he tries to lift at it, curious.

In the fish-eye mirror above him, he sees the cock of a head, and hears the rolling stool go to motion.

“Hey, you awake over there?” a voice says, clear and calm, coming closer.

Jared brushes a craggy tangle out of his eyes and feels — the rest of his hair all pushed up atop his head from all sides, and, prying around, secured with a thick rubberband. Oh. It feels stupid. He probably looks real stupid. 

“Hope you don’t mind,” the only other person in here says, “had to see if you’d kicked your own ass enough to need some knitting done.” 

He comes into view and a pair of petal gentle fingers touch at a few sensitive spots near Jared’s temple, and it feels blushy, sore, “nah, no Frankenstein, though,” and Jared remembers at once and very brilliantly who this face belongs to. 

It’s the guy with the ears. 

And at Jared’s expression, the little grin the new overnight nurse was wearing falters, misreading his surprise, and he says, “Do you know why you’re here?”

Sometimes the therapist leaves Jared’s thick file open enough to see in. The notes margin is comprised of words like ‘continues to harbor conflict within himself’ and ‘antipathy towards others’ and ‘no significant improvement’. 500mg/day. 

Jared’s got what they call an aggressive form of schitzotypal disorder with paranoid delusions, and a garden of little girls he made graves for, half a dozen. Teddy bears in the dirt. He knows why he’s here. 

“In the infirmary,” the guy says, like he’s observing Jared’s web of thoughts, watching his brain bubble. Can he do that? Jared knows there are people out there who can do that. 

Jared watches his mouth move, then looks around the room for his slippy shoes when he notices that his feet are all naked and long. He’s got monkey toes, and he curls them to hide it.

“When you hurt yourself, do you know that you’re doing it?” The guy’s flipping through his metal clipboard, studying Jared’s chart, looking for behavioral peculiarities. There’re too many of those. Jared wants to tell him it’d be a simpler route to look for his regularities. But he doesn’t.

“Okay, well,” sigh, chin rub, “how’s that cranium feeling, then? Soft pain or something cramping, kinda piercing?” 

Soft pain? Jared’s never heard of that. It sounds dreamlike. He nods, happy with that new idea.

“Yeah? It hurts bad?”

No, Jared thinks, it hurts good. He smiles. He thinks he’s smiling. He must be. His cheeks feel balled. 

“Can you give me a little more something to go on?” the guy says, tapping his clicky pen rhythmically against his name tag. Ackles, J. That sounds made up. And his eyes look like black dots in the photo. Dark, round blobs pinpricking his face and they’re much different in person; grassy, wide, like a painted-on toy. They’re really remarkably colored. 

Before Jared can get too suspicious, J. Ackles says, like he’s talking to himself, “guy wakes his cellmate up bashing his headbone against concrete and isn’t sure if it hurts now…”

Then, paging noisily, eyes scanning old typed up records, “can you not speak?” Flip, flip. “Oh, yeah. You don’t talk.” His ears do the rose thing again, and it crawls to the bridge of his nose, too. He sounds sorry. He sounds sincerely sorry and that he might say so out loud to someone deemed unfit for society and a threat to all forms of life. “Says here you — that your hearing’s fine.”

Nod. Yes. Jared’s a great listener. He hears so many different dialects.

Clucked tongue, freckly hand whisking down a chagrined face. “I’m better at this, I swear.” Little polka-dots all over his fingers, his face. Innocent. “Okay, restart. I’m new here,” self-sweeping open-palm motion, “and you’re—” back to the file, “well, you’re not. Fifteen? Is that true? You’ve been in since then? A sophomore?”

Two nods, tried as an adult and the gavel wasn’t a toy. Because grown up actions come with grown up consequences. 

“Alright, Jared— ” mouth working, “—P.,” he says, lamely. Jared’s eye twinkles. Two funny names. “Jared P., nineteen years old and in relatively sound health is ... prone to self-inflicted seizures?”

J. Ackles wheels himself back over to the ancient desk, mouses around on the screen. After a minute, he glances back over his shoulder, eyes flitting to Jared’s wrist-bind, doublechecking. “You live over in Psyche?”

It’s not a life, really, but his bed’s there, and all his playdoh molds and his checked out library book slimmed under his mattress, so, three full nods. 

“We need a better logging system,” J. Ackles says, under his breath, and X’s out of Jared’s criminal bio. 

“Anyway, you can tell me your tale some other time,” and Jared thinks he might be kinda silly, was that a joke? His lips are wry, eyes good natured. “So how about for now, we just do a run on your vitals now that you’re up and if all looks tip top, you can rest up here for a while?”

He says it like Jared is still allowed things like options and opinions, and even pauses briefly for Jared to fit an answer in, if he wanted. Jared offers his free arm for the puffy cuff thing and lifts his tongue for the thermometer. J. Ackles belongs in a children’s storybook, not a plotless slasher film. 

Jared wonders over this, idyllic, and eventually falls back to the sheep listening to J. Ackles redoing the pharmacy inventory.

 

~

 

Sometimes Jared’s ears work too good, that’s all.

He doesn’t particularly want to know about the slither-slide sound that little insect legs make, when they’re methodically dragging up your 6x8 walls every night, looking to crawl into a snore-open mouth.

Or the specter man who hung himself in Jared’s cell forty years before Jared was even born. 

He visits a couple of times a month, always frantic, always purple-throated, trying to tell Jared new secrets. He speaks oddly. Mostly in moans and burpy noises, never getting many words out before he blips gone. Jared’s always irritated by the interruptions, hates the stunted sound of his speech, full of saliva and old sickness.

Jared never plans to do it, but sometimes the unforgiveness of a wall is an aid. 

 

~

 

Nuñez from cell block B is down in medical with a bloody paw the next night.

It’s been twenty-two hours since Jared tried to suffocate all the clatter in his head, and he’s being brought down for a follow up, general observation. Nuñez is sitting in one of the three waiting chairs out in the hallway, a thing of bandages swaddling his hand in mummy wraps. Like Jared, he’s also wearing anklets and a chain belt. Unlike Jared, he’s making a load of commotion.

Nuñez wants to get back into the infirmary’s immediate area, now. “Guard, please. This shit’s bleeding out, look. _Por favor_. C’mon.”

He doesn’t say anything to Jared of course, direct or otherwise, most folks give Jared a wide berth in here, are content to not interact with a known grenade, 6 and a half feet big, taller than most of the population, but he’s got a chink of hostility in his jaw when Jared passes. 

Jared shuffles by him, being waved in upon arrival, and Nuñez looks him dry in the eyeball and seems to put a curse on Jared, bitter. Jared’s getting what Nuñez wants. 

 

~

 

J. Ackles takes a penlight to both of Jared’s eyes, lifts the eyelids, shines a beam-bright inspection, and then he plugs up his ears and listens to the music box of Jared’s cupped in chest, though it doesn’t know a lot of tunes.

“Lookin’ pretty alright, considering,” J. Ackles says, swooping the pads of his fingers against Jared’s scalp, over the skin glue he’d applied to a smaller lesion. Most of it’s just scraped, mottling over. “But you’ve got a gnarly road bump right—” feely fingers. “Hmm. Lemme.”

As J. Ackles makes quick steps to the other side of the sterile little room, it’s then that Jared notices the midsummer scent of him, because he takes it with him when he goes. Cool crisp citrus, but mellowed out. He smells like a clean thing, something that could only be brought in from the outside. 

It’s a black rubberband that J. Ackles comes back with, after rooting around in his desk drawers.

Jared frowns, and continues to frown all throughout his hair being put into an updo. Again.

“What?” J. Ackles says, pulling back and catching Jared’s sulk. “You don’t like it?”

He can’t actually see it, but— 

There’s a red framed mirror hung on a wall mount and even though Nuñez has taken to rapping the knuckles on his good hand against the glass before the CO out there with him yaps _knock it off, Nooner_ , J. Ackles goes to get the mirror and brings it over.

Not close enough for Jared to grab, shatter, and brandish a broken shard at him, but close enough for Jared to get a good, gleaming glimpse of himself. Long hair up, over-protruding cheekbones, the same beaky nose he’s had since he was eight. 

While he’s still deciding what he thinks, J. Ackles takes the mirror back and says, “well, anyway.” He clears a cough, rubs at the swell of his mouth.

“It’s just so I can get a better look,” he says, still explaining. 

He starts to soothe at the nodule bulging up behind Jared’s ear, doing doctorly things that Jared doesn’t know about, and determines that as long as he can trust that Jared’s no longer a menace to himself, he sees no reason to keep him detained down here any longer, all clear.

Nuñez is starting to holler again, spouting off about inmate rights and what is and what isn’t constitutional. 

Nuñez has a hatch mark ink of tallies on the back of his neck, known for several bouts of brutal rape that landed him here, and J. Ackles’ lips purse together, white-seamed. He looks braced, a resignation in his posture.

Jared’s an overthinker, often to the point of mania, but today he drums his fingers against his knee, sort of like morse code. He’s tapping out a message only he can decipher but J. Ackles glances over at him anyway.

“What,” he says, and looks over to where Jared’s looking, at the wide window behind them, where Nuñez has now resorted to bargaining with the guard, looking to gain quicker entry.

There’s something Nuñez wants in here, badly, and Jared’s mounting thoughts are painting a picture.

It’s the nurse.

Soft-sighing but determined not to surrender, J. Ackles looks back to Jared. And embarrassment colors him right up when he realizes that Jared’s realized. 

“I can handle loudmouths,” he says, distracting himself with signing off on Jared’s new chart. And if not — that’s why staff wear body alarms and are armed with fight sticks and rubber bullets. In J. Ackles’ case, though, he’s got a syringe of something somewhere on his person. All medical does. 

Jared tilts his head in that little dog way all the school teachers once loved him for, and when it’s gotten him J. Ackles’ full attention, Jared nods towards the window, then back to where they are. He blinks punctuation. 

“Um, I’m not sure that’s really a good—” J. Ackles looks around, like for a better answer. “If I’m even understanding you?” He laughs a little, weak.

Jared’s face softens in increments. Nuñez is a bitch. And only bitches take joy in hurting things littler than them. J. Ackles has good height, but there’s more than one way to be small.

“You want him to come in? Now?” 

Even though Jared’s hair is up in a doofy ponytail thing, he doesn’t think anyone, let alone a punk, will line their toes up against his. No one has yet. And Jared’s never used that to his advantage before, or wanted to. But J. Ackles has ears that bloom pink, and nice things are hard to come by in prison.

“Oh. Well, okay,” J. Ackles says, relenting quicker than Jared expected, “but just don’t, you know, do anything. Just,” he scratches at his brow bone. “Just sit there.” He mumbles a sort of disbelief to himself, then motions OK to the CO. 

He isn’t sure why J. Ackles is trusting him, or putting more stock in a wiggy con like Jared than the actual officer on duty, but it’s a charming kind of sentiment, and if Jared were off his meds, he might even be feeling bashful because of it. 

But he’s not, so he isn’t, and when Nuñez tramples in and Jared doesn’t trample out, Nuñez’s face goes sour.

It’s right, Jared was right. Nuñez wanted to be alone in here with the pretty new nurse and Jared’s got inklings why for. Slobber some romance, tell J. Ackles just where he wants to put his meat and how often and how good, cop a feel and howl about it, handful of ass and something new to jerk his dick stump to. 

Jared plants his feet on the floor and doesn’t go away. 

J. Ackles cleans out the hand Nuñez came in about, an anticlimactic gash that Jared scoffs at, and he watches as J. Ackles snaps on a pair of latex gloves, cornflower blue and frigid in color, impersonal. J. Ackles doesn’t want any part of his skin touching any part of Rey Nunez’s. 

He flushes it out with an antibacterial solution, tosses the squeeze bottle aside, then goes to fetch fresh dressing. 

Nuñez is inside for a time smaller than ten minutes, in after Jared and out before him, and he doesn’t try to run any game on the nurse, maybe a meth-mouth smile and a _mm, yeah, thanks baby_ , but nothing more food yanking or hostile. 

He does, though, in those not-ten-minutes, decide that maybe Jared’s a homeboy afterall, an _hermano_ , because he leans over while J. Ackles is scribbling his discharge and says to Jared like a shared pain, “ _esta muñeca_ ,” while he bites his lip, stares at J. Ackles’ bottom. 

Jared looks at Nuñez obliquely, pondering over how pulpy human eyes are.

 

~

 

As he walks back over to 3 Building, the subsection just off the main prison where his dorms are housed, Jared watches his footstep patterns and wonders what it means when someone who’s studied medicine tells you that you’re on the quick path to recovery, and thirty minutes later schedules you for a third appointment the next night. Then smiles at you, somewhere between unsure and warm. Like Jared’s a person.

“Yo, what’s all this?” Mr. Victor says, when Jared’s back in his unit, trading manacles for a sleeping tablet. “New ‘do!”

Mr. Victor oversees all of 3 Building and he’s good with the residents, friendly but not naively so. He doesn’t forget that any one of them could fall out of their stupor and go for his carotid. But he’s got a crickety laugh and untold tolerance, years of experience between his eardrums.

Mr. Victor, who likes to talk to Jared like Jared’ll talk back, grins at Jared’s hairdo, that Jared forgot about.

Jared huffs thinly through his nostrils, his eyes slit all crabby, but finds a shrug. He's on his way to a smile.

 

~

 

When Jared’s back in bed, wedged between the curdle of recent urine and the racket of someone across the hall sobbing themselves to sleep, he’s startled by the sunburst thought, as he’s shutting his eyes, that J. Ackles never did bother to wear gloves for either of Jared’s visits.

 

~

 

Chow is held in the same place for everyone.

“It don’t matta if you Ted Bundy or you think you Bugs Bunny,” one of the tour-guiders had told Jared upon arrival, years ago, taking in Jared’s all white prison gear, headcase uniform, different from the standard blues, “we all shovel shit right here and got manners ‘nough to not ask for seconds.”

A lot of life on the inside is carried out by way of laundry mentality — whites with whites, darks with darks. Gang ink for gang ink. It’s different from when you’re out on the blacktops playing streetball or looking for a good head count to hustle cards. Co-mingling. But you only eat with family.

Jared sits at a table along the perimeter and slurps the spaghetti slosh from his spork, slogging his roll through the watery sauce, drinking his 1% milk, saving his portion of fruit custard for last. 

It’s a good seat. Somewhere where he can see all of the goings-on, or get his back to the wall, quick, if someone’s double-crossed someone, if shivs are flying. 

Some of the geezers slide their trays next to his, more age spots and long ivory nose hairs than anything truly thug left about them these days. Most use canes. Wear breathing tubes.

The Chesters tend to stick together, safer in numbers, but they’ve always got sweatdrops on their upper lips, never safe for as long as they’re in. All have had their assholes shredded at some point, usually the first night under the roof, because nobody likes the kiddy diddlers. 

It’s a lively day today.

The hive is in a constant buzz but there seems to be a note of thrill overhead, something stirring the atmosphere. There’s talk of the latest cartel news, a well known kingpin on the outside gunned down, and the resulting shift in the inside hierarchy of the drug trade, but it isn’t that.

Behind him, at the girlfriend table, they’re less careful with what they say. Because who’s even around to hear them? The humpback elderlies? That tall, skinny, deadbrained kid? 

Jared licks fruit custard off his spork, looking at the curve of his cuticles, listening to chatter. Someone drops the word _riot_. Everyone thinks Jared’s kind of slow. 

 

~

 

It’s drizzling when he goes out for work detail, assigned to yard clean up, just him and his rake.

Jared’s working section by section, combing leaves into big, damp piles, when he overhears a couple of the homeboys making arrangements, who will be where and how best to capitalize, strategies, signals.

Nuñez is part of them. He looks at Jared, for a non-thinking moment, then goes back to blueprinting. 

 

~

 

“Got another date, huh?” Mr. Victor says, when he and one of the COs come to fetch Jared from his dorm. 

He was just finishing the part where Annie Wilkes kills the cop, and he’s jolted by the intrusion, kind of twisty in his bedsheets, eyes agog. He wedges his empty potato chip bag bookmark between the pages, slides quickly into his shoes. It’s only 8pm. It’s an earlier visit.

Jared’s never been on a date in his life. He doesn’t know what they’re like, what they’re supposed to be like, what you do on them. Mr. Victor didn’t mean anything by it but the book has him all weird.

He catches the paperthin ghost of his reflection in a neighbor’s window and kind of uncertainly pats at his hair.

The guard nor Mr. Victor comment on Jared’s bulging erection. He loves that story.

 

~

 

“Hey there, Jared P.,” says J. Ackles when he’s admitted into the room. 

The CO stations himself just outside, and Jared wonders if J. Ackles knows a lot of other Jareds.

There aren’t any other prisoners around this time, here, so Jared sits up on the patient table and swings his legs a little, paper crinkling beneath his butt. He walked the whole way here with the crotch of his pants like a teepee and nothing about that’s changed. It makes his belly feel turbulent.

J. Ackles has put up a laminated placard on one of the walls, with little faces ranging from wide-smiley yellow to a joyless, kinda pathetic blue, and he points to it, asks Jared which one he is.

Jared’s not particularly yellow by design, so he points over to the second one, a cactus green guy with simple gladness, and J. Ackles says, “cool, good,” and doesn’t fuss with checking Jared’s head.

Then he says, after a while of staticy silence, “I just thought. Maybe you, that you might wanna get outta that room you’re probably sick of,” and doesn’t he know that Jared’s sick from a lot things? All of him is ill. “And it was lined up to be a kinda quiet night down here anyway, so.”

Oh, he’s looking for company, Jared thinks, tripped up by the idea that someone would seek out his presence, and then just as swiftly, _distrustful_ with the idea that someone’s seeking out his presence. 

But then J. Ackles says, “unless you wanted to sleep? Oh man, were you sleeping? I hope this didn’t wake you,” and Jared’s already shaking his head no, because J. Ackles looks kind of like the lavender guy near the end of the faces, now, mouth canted down.

He wants to tell J. Ackles that he was just reading a book he’s read thirty-two times but — he affixes a probably choppy looking smile instead. It’ll do. It does.

Jared stays for two hours, until guards have a rotation, and he watches J. Ackles go on about his workday, setting up profiles for new inmates, approving prescription requests, stamping DENY on others, and he even lets Jared help with some more basic stuff—

The organization of the shelf of exam gowns, refilling the vitamin bottles, finding a better home for the tins of test strips and alcohol prep pads. Hurtless things.

J. Ackles lets Jared use the label maker for further systeming. That one is a lot of fun.

 

~

 

Partway into the first hour, J. Ackles says, sigh rustling his hairline, “alright, I gotta ask.”

Jared, who’s still re-rolling some of the self-adhering bandages, looks over at him. They’d been working companionably, separately, J. Ackles’ click-clack typing and Jared’s usual hush.

“Are you okay?”

Jared feels at his head, which is a little thorny to touch at, but fine, he’s fine, he’s— J. Ackles is shaking his.

“No, I mean—” and he kind of makes a prim little gesture to Jared’s uniform. The bottom half of it. Where he’s still all, that. 

Jared doesn’t think he feels shame the way other people do, but he thinks maybe that he’s supposed to, especially when J. Ackles wrings his pale hands and says, “is it a medical thing, or — recreational?”

That doesn’t make any sense to Jared. It happens. His body just does that. One time he made six wet, white messes in his bunk and it was still up.

He doesn’t think J. Ackles wants to know that though, so he tugs his earlobe and goes back to sorting supplies, without ever really answering.

 

~

 

Silver fang and his boys are down in the weight pit the next afternoon, when Jared wanders in to spend some time with the high bars. 

Sometimes he runs. Goes for laps and laps around the brim of the complex, fringing up near the fencing of it, runs like he’ll get somewhere else eventually. But he likes the high bars best.

He works through his chin-ups, Spanish counting, and ignores the holes in the columns, how there could be cameras in there, rigged, recording, watching him, evaluating his movement, auditing him— Jared makes himself ignore the holes. 52 chins, 53 chins, _cincuenta y cuatro_.

“Fuck,” fang says, toweling his forehead, his armpit crust, done with chest presses. He sets down two 100 pound dumbbells and tells the boys, tells the crazy guy listening, “ain’t had me a good lady in too long,” in a way where he must mean something more than the peroxide beauties. 

The primpy, friendly ones who wear kool-aid lipstick and wall paint nail polish on their fingers, who pull their hanging bits back and talk like Jessica Rabbit. Jared’s seen fang go into the laundry common with some of them. 

“Too _got_ -damn long.” But he sounds more hopeful than woeful. Like that’s gonna change soon, he’s sure of it, he knows it. He’s planning on it. 

Jared stops at 62 and covers a column hole with his thumb, so no one can see what thought he’s thinking right now.

 

~

 

Bug ward gets a visitor.

Jared’s work hours have ended and it isn’t count time yet, so he’s sitting in the day room listening to the antennaed radio by the barred window, making an ashtray out of orange clay.

The two guys at the foldout table next to him are at it again, playing a passionate game of checkers that’s been ongoing for more than three harrowing days. Stakes are high. Jared doesn’t know who will win. One guy doesn’t even exist.

Voices coming down the hall, turn the corner, near the badging gate, beep beep, they’re in, hummy convo, _sure, he’s probably over here, prefers the openness of the area_ , shoe squeaks, blurs of motion, _this way, he likes to see the sunflower fields_ , fabric swish, _oh yeah, it’s a good view._

That’s Mr. Victor, Jared’s known that voice for the past four years, and along with his deep, calm, pendulum-swing tone, Mr. Victor brings — a grapefruit scent. Citrus.

Jared’s head pokes up, so he can see over the bench back. He’d been hunched, working meticulous fingers, smoothing the inside edge, but it’s still kind of malformed, maybe he’s going for folk art-ish, but then there’s a white medical coat and an oatmeal button up sweater underneath that, and “hey, Jared P.” Wiggle fingered wave. And Jared, in a puzzle, waves back.

 

~

 

They’ve moved him away from the table game, a considerate seclusion, but it means he’s also moved away from the window. His left leg bounces, he curls his hair-knots behind his ears. They’re sitting in a pair of rocking chairs.

“I don’t want to alarm you, that’s not what I came down here for,” J. Ackles says, talking in a concealed hush. Mr. Victor had offered to stay, if Jared wanted, but Jared’s not a minor anymore. 

The CO hovers near the doorway. He doesn’t give J. Ackles the same choice. 

“But,” J. Ackles has that look in his eye, the same one the therapists get, plucking, “I do need to know,” and Jared doesn’t want to talk about the little pigtail girls, or the contamination in their systems that no one but Jared could see, he wants to make his ashtray, he wants J. Ackles to be the yellow happy face guy, “if you’re being harmed.”

Jared’s knee stops mid-spring.

“I don’t want you to be embarrassed, or think you’re snitching by telling me,” pause, unjudging smile, “I’m the one asking you.”

The corner pocket of Jared’s mouth wilts in. His confusion makes him feel stupid. J. Ackles would be impressed with his IQ, if he knew.

“Look, Jared,” he says, no P., and Jared likes that, instantly, “what was happening with you the other day,” funny little motion again, at Jared’s lap, “it isn’t uncommon, it’s actually very prevalent with those in the same situation,” studied stare. “It can stem directly from assault.”

Jared’s chair hasn’t rocked in a full minute. He wants to check if his ears are on upside down today. “—signs of trauma,” J. Ackles is telling him, and, “if there’s anything going on, anything, we can.”

He stops there, suddenly at a Y in the road.

What? What can they do, even if what he’s thinking is true? Ad seg? Hole Jared up in the sissy unit?

Jared sends him a speaking stare. No. No. That’s all wrong. Nobody has attacked him. He isn’t being molested. 

“No?”

No. Jared dragon huffs. Eyerolls up at the ceiling.

“I’m — I’m wrong?” J. Ackles asks, needing to be sure. “I mean, I’ll be glad to be wrong but.”

If he were anybody else, Jared would start blowing spit bubbles at him on principle. He’s 76% insulted, but also 24% flattered. To be cared about, however professionally. He just has very active sexual organs. J. Ackles really didn’t need to come all the way over here for them. 

J. Ackles grins, a full flowerbloom thing, relieved, and grabs the clipboard he’d set aside and starts scrawling something down in it. He flips to a questionnaire in Jared’s file, _since I’m here_ , and starts firing off quick questions like they’re playing the hot potato game. 

Any trouble catching your breath? History of heart/liver/lung disease? Has anyone in your family had prostate cancer? And then it takes a really sharp dead man’s curve into the other history.

“Have you been sexually active in the last year?” J. Ackles asks, developing a tic on the spot, thumbing his clicky pen on and off. “It’s. It’s confidential. You won’t get in trouble if you say yes.”

Jared resumes rocking, shakes his head.

“Do you have sex with men, women, or both?” And here, J. Ackles’ ears stain like merlot. Jared loves when they do that, and J. Ackles clarifies, “well, before. Before you were here.”

But Jared shakes again. Fifteen minutes ‘til count. He can only see the gun towers from this angle, not the fields.

“Um, well. It’s usually not a yes or no answer.” Clicky sticky pen.

It’s not a no, it’s a neither. 

“Okay,” neck matching ears, sensing that Jared’s done with the question and moving on from it, a little aslant, “when was the last time that you—” but Jared cuts him off here, just starts no-ing before he’s got it all poured out. He stomps his foot. Not mean, for emphasis. The CO looks over at Jared with a pitbull gaze.

“You don’t?” J. Ackles says, quieter, between them. He’s almost leaning against Jared’s chair. “You don’t have sex?” 

Jared leans in, too, just to see what’ll happen. Maybe this is what dates are like, he thinks, finding himself hilarious, and the CO reaches for his baton, J. Ackles saying, winded, “or you’ve, you’ve never… had sex?”

This time Jared nods, finally having something to nod to, never ever, and he wants to be ornery and tick off the asthma box in _J. Ackles’_ chart; he’s the one who seems to be having trouble catching breath. 

 

~

 

J. Ackles has been gone for five minutes when the stout man with spooly blonde electro-shock curls, the one double-playing checkers, screams with his beige teeth, “He cares about your dick!” 

He leans back in his wire-mesh chair, covers his mouth with both hands, snickering behind them, making little fists and knocking his knuckles together kiddishly, “dick doc, dick doc.”

It makes Jared, wide eyed from the attention, rush out of the room and hurry back to his dorm for lockdown.

 

~

 

“Got a proposition for you, son,” the warden tells him, steepling sausagey fingers, elbows set on a slap spread of manila files. “Ordinarily, as you know, you get an assignment and that there’s the tail end of it. But this is a little different,” and that much is clear, because Jared’s only been brought in to see the warden twice in double the years. Today is three.

“We’re taking into consideration your good behavior,” warden says, an emphasis, “and that, along with the recommendation, is the only reason we’re talking.” 

He presents Jared with a print-out of job duties to look over, with the suggested new work hours highlighted up top in pink marker. Graveyard. 

“It’ll be a complete shift in your agenda,” he explains, Jared’s eyes still rummaging the page, he only knows of two other inmates on this schedule and they do meal prep, other kitchen work, “and you won’t participate in final count. You’ll be at your work post instead.” Jared looks up.

“Ackles says you display a strong labor ethic, that you’re befitted for something above a broom. Your history here seems to agree with him, far as I can see of it, but I’ll tell you, he’s sticking his neck out big for you. Looking to bring you on board as staff support. Ain’t light.”

And Jared thinks, feeling kind of shrimpy in his seat, that all he did was make fancy labels for the band-aids. 

“Pay won’t change,” warden says, taking a sip of his sparkling strawberry water, still ¢.98/hr, “but you’ll get to work at a more subdued pace, and,” get to be with J. Ackles, Jared thinks, “there’ll always be air conditioning,” warden says, like that’s the most incredible part of it.

“You can have some time to think it over, say forty-eight hours—” as Jared’s halfway done signing and initialing with the same pink marker there on the desk.

 

~

 

When Jared stops in the east corridor bathrooms for a quick spill, he’s met with the customary slurping sounds of a hurried union coming from the stalls. With his hands under the tap, rinsing, Jared takes his slow honey time, methodically soaping around each nail-moon.

He’s just staying to listen. It’s the first time he ever does that.

 

~

 

“Oh,” J. Ackles says when he sees him there in the open doorway, when they start him the very next night. He looks cartoonishly surprised to see Jared here, now, like he wasn’t sure he’d agree, or agree so fast. “Hi.”

Jared scuttles in, and the CO perfunctorily removes all of his restraints. Jared signs in on the work log, looks around at the anatomy posters, the eye charts, his new place of employment. Sort of. 

J. Ackles sets him up with a box of sealed folders that need to be slimmed down, alphabetized, or shredded. There are great big Yertle the Turtle type stockpiles just like it to get through in the little medical records storage room. It’s mostly mindless, but Jared likes the simple rhythm of it.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d go for it,” J. Ackles finally breaks the calm, between the 2005 L—P boxes, “if you’d even be interested.” 

He’s looking at Jared, and then not looking at Jared, and Jared bangs a little on the metal cabinet, a cheerful ruckus, so that when J. Ackles looks his way again, Jared can give his best picture day grin.

The one J. Ackles sends back is crushing. Because he’s got the brokenheart face of a movie star dead too young, and hardly seems to know it. He shines.

Quitting time comes at five a.m., when the first gilded rays begin their push through the dark, sunspill infiltration of the bolted-on window grill, Jared getting refitted with his ironwork, J. Ackles heading out to the access control facility, where they’ll both head home to their beds. 

Congenial. That’s how it goes for close to two weeks.

 

~

 

One of the grandpas that sits at Jared’s good lookout table at meal times uses a state-supplied larynx tool.

It makes him sound unreal and synthesized, like everything he says is spoken from outer space. Jared’s grown to enjoy the robot sound of him, once he’d gotten over his initial certainty that the old man was a humanoid government plant. Cyborgs don’t steal raisins from the cafeteria. 

At breakfast, the topic is usually the weather, or something arthritic. Lunch is for recalling the gems of youth. And dinners are reserved for that which proves most precious for everyone — emotionally distant, neurotic teen boys not included — their outside attachments and the tattered threads of them that they still hold on to. 

The aluminum voice man presses his little device to his throat, and talks of the last time he saw his sweetheart wife, what she was wearing, how she loved her pearls. _When you meet her, you just know._

Jared eats part of a fish stick and pushes his tray away.

 

~

 

The pleasurable thing about Jared’s new in-house career is that it’s not all filing and dusting, and counting how many cartons of NRT patches they’ve got left; they get used as a means of currency in the slammer, which J. Ackles was initially unaware of but has since been schooled. 

Other things happen.

J. Ackles tells him why the prison keeps a padlock on muscle rub cream. Packets mysteriously go missing if left out in the open. J. Ackles starts to explain why, and cherries up along the bridge of his nose, laughs, and Jared gets a really clear and sordid picture — that’s what that minty smell is at night.

J. Ackles also brings in contraband occasionally. 

It’s usually little tubs of powdery cookies, but it’s been a pack of candy chews more than once, a bag of tropical skittles one memorable night. Jared doesn’t dabble in illegal highs, that’s never been his crutch, but this — J. Ackles taps a small wealth out into Jared’s hand and he almost curls into a ball. He makes seven skittles last all shift.

He shares things with Jared, too, now and then, things he maybe shouldn’t say, how the most abused meds they have are wellbutrin, effexor, a lot of gabapentin, “and laxatives.” Jared’s face is a response.

“Yeah,” J. Ackles says, words falling to chuckles, “it’s not subtle.” 

And sometimes, when the guards are busy rooting through the new inmate belongings for valuables, they play word search games on J. Ackles’ phone. Often the infirmary is just quiet.

 

~

 

“I remember you,” J. Ackles admits once, putting away one of the older models of a vital signs monitor, so his head’s partway buried in a cabinet shelf, expression obscured by the open door of it.

Jared’s setting up the new one they received in shipment, mounting it on the mobile stand, and he really wants to see what face J. Ackles is wearing when he says that. He’s learned a lot about J. Ackles solely in how he holds himself, the singular way his forehead crumples when he’s in a meticulous mood. 

Jared goes over to the shelf area and waits for J. Ackles to be done. He doesn’t touch him, because he can’t, but as soon as the machine is put away, Jared closes the cabinet door, stares.

“Oh, god,” J. Ackles says, and they sound like two distinct, isolated words, a breath between. He looks up at Jared so suddenly near, and says, “yeah, I remember,” all of his features precise up close, a full collection of focal points, and Jared couldn’t know where to gaze first, “I don’t remember yesterday’s brunch, but,” Jared chooses eyes, and looks inquisitively in, “I couldn’t seem to forget your face.”

Jared remembers J. Ackles from the interview also and tells him so on the blank page of a little RX pad.

**me too** , he writes, and J. Ackles looks at it for a long time, warring with himself on saying something else or not saying anything at all, it’s there on the surface of him, and the CO just doing his job jabs on the glass to see if everything’s okay in here, _nobody’s moved in a while?_

The irrational boil that Jared feels in those two seconds, usually tranquilled by his prescriptions, almost unnerves him into asking for his old job back. Just nearly.

 

~

 

Visitation days are mediocre in quality when there’s nobody left in the world who knows you or wants to know you.

In almost five years, there hasn’t been a name written beside his in the visitor index and it has never been anything that’s caused him pause, just a day, another, unnotable.

It’s the same way on this one, everyone gelling their hair and donning cleaner blues, all active and anxious, and Jared remains unmoved, he’s the same. Except today he’s got his chin in his hand, thinking about the funny way J. Ackles laughs with his head to the ceiling when he’s found even a tiny joy with something.

Jared looks out at the thicket of fields and sits with that soft sound in his head.

 

~

 

A shakedown lands upon the main cell blocks near the end of the week, on a Thursday.

Every pen gets raided — mattress slabs pulled loose, hook contraptions plunged down toilets to be reeled back out, K9s brought in, a real red carpet affair. There’s a cacophonic of barking, from the animals as well as the dogs, for more than three hours on a loop. It’s ongoing and endless.

Things aren’t the same in Jared’s unit. That was tried once, over here, but all they found were secret stashes of religious paraphernalia or Barbie heads, the diary of a guy who was trying to build a bomb out of lead shavings and a light bulb. It’s a different breed of danger in this section, but very little fanfare comes with it. Nobody’s sitting on any kilos in this faction.

So whatever it is that’s found in a couple of homes in A and B, and confiscated, Jared doesn’t know about it. But it’s formidable enough that the wrath it sparks sets the pebble in motion, and it escalates quicker than it was all meant to. Sloppy.

In 24 hours, everything will be different.

 

~

 

Doc is usually around in the daytime, paired with either one of the other nurses that, along with J. Ackles, make up the small medic crew. He presides over the more frequent and varied visits that come with non-nocturnal hours, so Jared still sees him multiple times a week.

As he’s getting blood drawn and watching the vial fill up in sludges, Jared finds that he’s unable to keep from staring at the back of Doc’s head, over at the computer, in the chair J. Ackles usually sits in, and inexplicably, feels the urge to get up and hug the fat lard man.

He could have hired any one of the other candidates. Doc could have hired anyone else.

 

~

 

It turns out to be one of the worst takeovers this particular prison has ever seen, and Jared’s actually asleep when it starts, an empty-afternoon kind of groggy, and he only wakes because the alarms are bleating and Roomie #4 is rocking in his bed so berserkly that the whole bunk frame is shaking.

Jared’s slept through more than one riot in the past. They don’t unfurl enough to reach this far.

The purple-throated man is back, and he watches from the corner as Jared gets to his feet, peers left and right out the window on his door, and though the hallway is deserted and only the red overhead lights are flashing, Jared gets the notion that something is _happening_ in the still.

The purple-throated man starts banging on the walls so Jared starts banging on the window.

And all the doors in Psyche unlock with a _snick_. From the main control board.

Jared’s the first one out of his cell, but the others come lurching out like a disturbed ant hill, droves of inmates in white spilling into the hall, lit up by pulses of red, wondering what’s going on, make it stop, make it stop, is it pill time?

Mr. Victor is working to smooth everyone over and keep the energy calm, tells them it’s only a drill, it’ll be over soon, but Jared sees in his eyes that he’s lying, that the sweat over his nose is cold, and when he tells a crying boy that _the nice dude is doing the med rounds today, you like him, remember?_ , the residual sleep left loitering in Jared’s head dries up and dies. 

The clock reads 11:08. Midday. J. Ackles shouldn’t be here.

Jared makes it over to Mr. Victor and manages to very efficiently herd him away from the mob without laying a finger on him. Jared blinks rapidly, unfocused, and Mr. Victor, astute, somehow knows what he means. Who he means.

“Yeah, man, ain’t that the shit of it?” he says, wiping his forehead with the back of a wrist. “Day off and the man comes in to cover a shift, then this happens.” He shakes his head, as a shrill voice from the walkie-talkie at Mr. Victor’s hip says that an officer is down, and there’s a few beats of heavy, lawless noise before it clicks out.

“It’s alright, Padalecki, it’ll all get under control.”

Mr. Victor is trying to bubblewrap Jared — Jared who is nothing but sharp, jagged parts — when in a matter of sped-up minutes, the same voice comes back through the frequency with an advancement: _infirmary compromised_ , and gives a couple of quick breathed instructions on how to proceed. Do not engage, get to designated emergency locations…

Jared’s not a screamer so he doesn’t scream. He walks calmly over to the main entry panel and waits there. Mr. Victor sighs, because he shouldn’t, they both know he shouldn’t, but they also both know what’ll happen to someone beautiful someplace ugly, so he swipes his access badge across the scanner until it beeps green.

Jared isn’t even wearing socks or shoes when he makes it out of the ward and into the main prison at a high run. 

 

~

 

The area hasn’t just been breached, by the time Jared gets there and takes in the small devastation of it; it’s been raided to its entrails. Bottles in disarray, cages broken into, all of the carefully labeled and slotted supplies that Jared and J. Ackles painstakingly laid out in a neat, orderly structure. Everything’s been violated. 

And J. Ackles isn’t anywhere.

 

~

 

Carnage overtakes the walls at a breathtaking rate. 

Jared would be pacified to find a good spectator seat and just watch, transfixed, as the fire that starts in one cell licks quickly into another, swirls of ash, long-lived rivalries ended with blades buried in bellies, celebratory rolls of toilet tissue soaring the air like party streamers. He’s done it before.

But that was, before.

And the thing about Jared is that it isn’t his stature that’s his sole ammunition, the towering shape of him, it’s that there’s something in Jared that was produced wrong on the factory conveyor belt, a missing component crucial to the ethos. It means that he’s never known compunction.

 

~

 

The med cart is sitting abandoned in the corridor, just outside the mailroom. It, too, has been raided of narcotics, sad looking and used. 

Jared stops, bare feet slapping to a shriek when he spots it in his run through the bulk of faculty facilities, and he isn’t silent about his oncoming arrival, but neither are the voices coming from within the room. Three, maybe four it sounds like.

J. Ackles has been divested of his immaculate white lab coat, bottom lip bleeding freely, distractingly, but he’s up on a heavy steel desk in a defensive crouch, holding a long scalpel in a steady hand. And it’s the first time Jared looks at him and realizes J. Ackles isn’t small at all, not inside, not anywhere. He’s intelligent, and brave, and he’s got the higher ground, but there are one, two, three, four, five of them surrounding him. 

It looks to be some sort of standoff between wolves and beasts, and the soft, slender, doe-creature they think one of them’s going to get.

There's fang and a couple of his, plus a slimy looking puss-faced man Jared doesn’t recognize, and Nuñez.

It’s Jared’s fault, when he clatters into the mail room with two heads and eight arms and a blankness in his stare, it’s his fault that J. Ackles glances over and sees him, eyes large, mouth slacking a smile of temporary happiness, and it’s enough of a moment for someone to act on.

Fang moves first, probably with his dick already out of his pants, and J. Ackles loses his balance when his ankle is fisted and he’s dragged down off of his safe spot, and somebody yells _“Don’t”_ at a strange, black decibel and everyone’s appropriately surprised, then, enough that they freeze.

But no one’s more surprised than Jared. He hasn’t heard his voice in years. He wasn’t supposed to still have one. It’s distorted, felt disfigured just in his throat, but it was him.

Maybe J. Ackles is more surprised, actually. He looks busted wide open. And then the room erupts.

 

~

 

When the guards come through with their riot gear and tear gas and finally discover them holed up in there after a grueling, extensive search of the building, Jared’s got the length of his body laid atop all of J. Ackles, curled over him, soft rocking, half catatonic from the shock of what he’s done.

Jared’s nose is nuzzled in J. Ackles’ neck, and he’s hmming into the skin, eyes closed, sheltering his favorite nurse from outside threats. Jared’s holding him, so he doesn’t know that they’re actually holding each other, and the guards don’t know it either, wouldn’t care even if they did.

The irony is that they use J. Ackles’ own little syringe full of sleepy tranq to stab into Jared’s neck, before they pull him off of J. Ackles, and carry him swiftly away, apart, J. Ackles now the one unable to speak.

 

~

 

Infractions are given for uncomplicated misconducts. 

Late for count, spit or other bodily fluids being flung, possession of bug sprays, homemade inhalants, any ideation or approximation of what a CO has deemed a weapon. You get an infraction.

Jared gets placed in POC lockup for a time no shorter than 72 full, completed hours. Total isolation, just one meal and a lot of water per day. The psychiatric observation cells are utilized when an inmate, especially a white-wearing one, has behaved egregiously out of character, lashed out.

It’s different from solitary only in that the thought behind it is that you’re being assisted vs corrected.

Jared can’t fully recall everything about that day, but the half-remembrances are complete on their own, strung together — how he broke three of fang’s fingers and tried to bite off a chunk of his face, managed some of it, went for the other guys, how one of them wasn’t breathing, after, the way Nuñez called him _loco_ and didn’t stick around — and he uses the heavy block of time as a dog house, to think about his actions, and his reasons. Reason.

 

~

 

The conclusion is direct, and pure, when he reaches for it. 

_Wouldn’t it be something, Charlie Brown thought, if that little red haired girl came over here and gave me a kiss? I’d say, “thank you, what was that for?” And wouldn’t it be something if she said, “because I’ve always loved you”?_

 

~

 

Jared doesn’t get to go back to his job, if he still has a job. They don’t tell him that. They don’t tell anyone anything, once the soot is clear and the bodies of one CO and three inmates are taken from the prison in long, unmarked, solemn looking vans. They also don’t tell Jared how many of those bodies, if any, he’s responsible for. 

They give him long hours in the day room to sit and listen to jazz and lonely blues, and look out at all the world he can see from one window, and drink his carton of grape juice. That’s what you do with the criminally insane. 

It smells like damp cigarettes in here. Jared is next for checkers.

 

~

 

“What ya doin’ over there, c’mon,” Mr. Victor says, tapping the fingers of a casted arm against his ribs. Jared’s poky little signature is in there nestled among the rest, because Mr. Victor got dinged up in the commotion after Jared left, but he’s still solid and standing. And smiling, “thought you was in such a hurry? Shit.”

Jared stands at the plasticy mirror beside the big entry desk in the dorms, and glares flatly at Mr. Victor in the reflection. Jared’s kidding, he doesn’t mean it. He does that sometimes.

Jared looks at his own face, pinches his eyebrows together, growls his lips off his teeth, then puddles back out into normal. Normalish. He decides to do it.

“Rubberband,” he says to Mr. Victor, like he’s been practicing, like a few of the other words they’ve been practicing together. Mr. Victor told him not to say cunt. So Jared said it four times in his cell after lockdown, privately rebellious. 

He sounds like a clogged chainsaw, and he struggles with pronunciation. Mr. Victor is reassuring, a speech disorder takes time to overcome, and it’s okay, that’s okay if he can't, if he never can. Jared can’t feel very much humiliation, but he does want to be understood. That’s important.

The thick, tan rubberband Mr. Victor finds for him gets his hair up decently, ropey chunks of it still hanging down in areas, but most of it’s in a nesty knot up on his head. He looks super, super stupid. But the voice-box grandpa said that sometimes, a lot of times, that’s just what you gotta do. So it’s just what Jared’s gotta do. 

He’s gotta.

“Got you another date then, huh,” Mr. Victor says, too good at keeping secrets he shouldn't know about, and he hands Jared off to the lockjaw CO, who walks him all the way to the infirmary where he’s been called down. His leg irons clink, and Jared stares at the walls, indifferently looking for cracks in the design.

Everything has cracks in it.

 

~

 

J. Ackles can’t even look at him. 

Jared signs in and sits down and J. Ackles gives his assent for the metal jewelry to be removed. The guard leaves them and goes back to his post, and J. Ackles can’t even look at him. 

Jared notices that all of the contents on the shelves have been tidily put back together and, if not for the gouges in the walls and the little scab beneath J. Ackles’ blistered lip, you wouldn’t be able to tell that anything even happened in here. The pain level chart has gone away somewhere.

“So,” J. Ackles says, reaching halfheartedly for a stethoscope, like he’s going to put on some sort of pretense, act like everything is still like before, and he asks, “what other things can you say?”

It’s not irritation in the quaver of his voice, but it sounds the same when someone’s been bruised. 

“Hi,” Jared says, brand new. 

J. Ackles does look at him, at this. Tense and frank, and full of much more eye contact than Jared has ever been very relaxed around, but Jared isn’t Nuñez. He’s not a bitch. They share a stare and J. Ackles, fleetingly, seems like he wants to come closer. “Is that all?” he says.

Of course that isn’t all, Jared’s got so much to tell him that he probably never will, couldn’t by any truth, and Jared licks his tongue around his mouth to wetten it, tells him, “you,” flinched fingers and uneven air, the way nervousness is described in his novels, “you got the mouth of something out of a Hustler magazine,” there, good.

J. Ackles looks at him, that oddball look Jared gets a lot, says “ _what_ ,” because that wasn’t what Jared meant to say, exactly.

But it’s better when, after a few coarse, scraping seconds, J. Ackles makes that little laugh noise. He shuts his eyes, headshakes, and Jared can see that his ears are doing that pink-fever thing they do, and he looks very, very embarrassed, but in that vulnerably beautiful way that only he is.

J. Ackles says, “oh my god,” and “you heard that from somewhere, didn’t you?” nod, Jared’s still great at nodding, and “of all the shit”, so Jared isn’t about to tell him the many other things men say about J. Ackles. It’s roiling. And he’s Jared’s little red haired girl, and Jared wanted to tell him that, he meant to, but.

The thing that’s possessed him the most is still, slow and unpolished, word by word, “what is your name?”

Jared’s no good with the weeps, it has no place in his norm, but when J. Ackles goes even fairer, dulled down, looks grieved by what Jared’s just asked, like he forgot that Jared didn’t know all this time, all this time, J. Ackles’ eyes gain a thick mucousy film. It just makes him even more of a diamond.

“Jensen,” he says, “it’s Jensen,” and watches while Jared goes to get the label maker he’s grown fond of, then spells it out for him and says, “yeah, perfect” when Jared prints **JENSEN** and attaches the sticky label to Jensen’s shirt. Jared nods. 

 

~

 

“I didn’t think this would happen,” Jensen says, when nothing even really has. “I shouldn’t have—” It’s been nine days since the riot, eleven since they worked together, and Jensen’s got a pout-mouth that Jared’s considering the curve of, “but,” he puts a finger on the apex of Jared’s cheekbone.

Jensen breathes out, says, “god, your hair,” like he’s only just now seen what Jared’s done with it. What Jared’s been trying to say, but is bad at.

But he knows it’s a date when Jensen sighs, says down to Jared’s big hand that he’s petting at, “you’re just, the thing they warn about” and waits to see what Jared might reply, waits for something, and he gasps when Jared gives it to him, a small kiss on the mouth when the guard’s looking away. It’s the kind of noise a man makes when he’s just been disemboweled.

 

~

 

Jared had never thought detailedly about these things before, but had he, had he wondered over it, he doesn’t think he would’ve dreamed that the first time he got his cock wet would be so — nasty. But it is. It excitingly is.

Especially when they’re hiding behind the rolling privacy screen and Jensen, who’d said “do you want to fuck me?”, estimates, um, they’ve got about four minutes, can you do it, do you think you can do it, it’s okay, and Jared’s had silent runny orgasms during sessions with his therapist, the muscles in his face used to non-movement. Jared doesn’t have laugh lines.

It’s altering, seeing him like this, seeing Jensen all bare, parts of him, Jensen’s pants at his ankles, his shirt all slutted up his back. Jared feels him out, here and here and here, when Jensen asks him to, when he says, “please touch me,” and Jared grabs at him awkwardly where his legs are split, holds it in his hand just to feel how it grows with each pulse, all because Jensen likes Jared. 

He hopes, abruptly and mind-clogged, that there aren’t any holes in the bricks watching them.

Jensen holds on to the edge of the exam table, scrabbling when Jared starts learning what to really do with his hips instead of stabbing around in there just because it feels good for Jared, feels good on his dick. Jensen makes little pitchy cries and Jared has to tell him, giggling, to shhh!

Jared’s nineteen and infatuated, he doesn’t need those noises. Can't handle that. He already walks around dripping babies as the usual.

It’s so nice to look down at, where Jensen’s squatted over him, taking it, how the long, jumpy length of Jared pushes in and in, and Jensen can take so much, Jared didn’t know that bodies could do that. But maybe Jensen just has a special body. Jared thinks he does.

“Jared,” he says, warm and human in Jared’s hands, hands clenching to his waist, turning his head back to beg for another kiss, the messy kind suffocated with tongue because the red haired girl is a pervert. Jared’s breath is shaking, Jensen Ackles is just too sweet.

He lets Jared be as young and selfish as he wants, doesn’t complain for lack of romantic qualities. Just bends back and kisses Jared and kisses Jared, little presses all around his cheeks and chin.

Jared comes clumsily, apologetic for it before it's even all done coming out, because very big messes come out of him, and he didn’t mean to, yet, but the whopping on the glass startled him and now he's got Jensen leaking out his load from one end and Jared’s load from the other and his cute little _cunt_ — Jared thinks, sneakily — is spasming in gentle flutters around him and it pulls another hot dribble from Jared.

“It’s that crazy _cabron_ in there,” someone says to someone else, “that kid,” more tapping, “yes, look,” surface squeak, “he’s layin’ it to nursey,” and nobody talks again. Busy looking.

“Oh my god,” Jensen says, harsh, trying to pull his pants back up, and Jared’s superficially sad to see the stringy shine on his pretty dick get put away, because Jensen’s noticed the inmates now, too, and he’s blushing awfully. 

Jared doesn’t know where the CO went, but prisoners know how to find all the tricky angles.

 

~

 

Things in the penitentiary are both constantly changing and never changing. 

The other week saw six people leave through the front door, one on parole, one for furlough, four in zip-up body bags. Someone got married through a window. A new item at the commissary was introduced.

Jared snacks on his sweet’n’salty crunchy pretzels and watches a twenty man bone-brawl get underway on the hoop court after someone called one too many fouls. Whistles blow. Bean bag guns are brought out.

Because there are still some things that can always be counted on: fights, fucks, deals, steals, the purr of a homemade ink tool, and somebody somewhere making prison hooch.

And this week, just today, Jared learned what the sucking pulls of a blowjob felt like, in the east corridor bathrooms.

He licks sugar dust from his fingers, tilts his face up 90° to feel the steady scorch of the sun, _on the ground, shitstains, get on the fucking ground._

 

~

 

_When you meet him, you just know_ , Jared thinks, and begins to utilize the heartless hours after lockdown to plan his quiet escape over the walls.

**Author's Note:**

> por favor - please  
> hermano - brother  
> esta muñeca - this doll  
> cincuenta y cuatro - fifty-four  
> loco - crazy  
> cabron - dumbass


End file.
